


a burden shared

by renecdote



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Batman themed get well gifts, Bedside Vigils, Dad feelings, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Trinity friendship, Watchtower - Freeform, bc it's bruce, even when he doesn't express them, there's always dad feelings, tim is robin, worrying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 15:11:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18813457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: Diana puts a hand on his shoulder. “He’s going to be okay, Bruce.”The gauntlets creak as Bruce clenches his fists. “You don’t know that,” he says, haggard and cracking around the edges.Diana’s hand shifts up, cupping his face, fingers scraping over the stubble shadowing his jaw. “I believe it.”Robin is injured. Bruce is worried. Clark and Diana offer comfort.





	a burden shared

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MemoryDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemoryDragon/gifts).



> For your prompt: Bruce, not Batman, staring at the earth in the watch tower (preferably feeling unhappy and helpless) and Clark and Diana seeing him (identity porn or no, up to you)
> 
> It sort of got away from me oops. Hope you enjoy!!

It never gets any easier. Every time he sees one of his… one of his kids laid up in a hospital, it’s like the first time sucker-punching him all over again. Dick, beaten and broken, one wrong breath away from flatlining under Alfred and Leslie’s quick-working hands. Jason…. God, Jason. Every memory of Jason laid up with injuries is blurred over with burns, ash glued to battered skin by tacky blood. Still warm, still gasping when Bruce reached him.

And now Tim.

Dr Mid-Nite is working steadily, murmuring orders to her assistants, Robin’s colours bared on the operating table, unnaturally still.

Bruce isn’t squeamish, blood doesn’t bother him, but he feels sick to his stomach watching through the observation window. And yet he does not look away. There’s this fear, just a thin thread but strong as zylon, coiled around his sternum, stuttering his breath with the possibility that he’ll lose this Robin as well if he looks away for even a second.

“Bruce… Come on, you’re torturing yourself,” Clark says at some point, still Superman in every way except the cape is draped over his arm. “The surgery could take hours yet, why don’t we go have a cup of tea? I won’t even make you talk, you can just drink it and brood.”

Bruce ignores him. After a while, Clark stops trying to nudge him out of the room. He doesn’t leave though, a steady presence by Bruce’s side. Maybe it is hours that they stand there, watching bloody gloves work with bloody tools. Maybe it’s minutes. Maybe it’s days, for all Bruce notices.

He feels like nothing could shake him from his place right now.

He feels like a stiff breeze could topple him.

He wants to draw his cape around himself, pull down the cowl, let the armour hold him steady and rebuild the walls crumbling to ash around him. He curls his fingers into the sleeves of his hoodie instead, crosses his arms across his chest and keeps his gaze fixed on the scene in the operating theatre. If something goes wrong—more wrong, this is already so wrong—he’s going to know as soon as it happens.

Clark puts a hand on his shoulder. Warm and solid. Grounding. Bruce leans into it and they wait in silence.

* * *

The recovery room isn’t any better. It should be a comfort, knowing Tim made it through the surgery, that he’s stable, recovering. So why isn’t it? Bruce sits in an armchair beside the bed and somehow he feels worse.

Here, the blanket pulled up over Tim’s chest hides most of the damage. He’s got an ugly black eye, already darkened to a deep purple. Bruce isn’t even sure it’s from the latest fight. He tries to call up Tim’s face at the Cave earlier, before the mask was plastered across his eyes, and hates that it’s murky, just out of reach.

The ugly knot in his chest grows bigger, more tangled with every second he spends staring at the jagged lines tracing heartbeat and blood pressure and oxygen. He straightens the blanket and scrolls through his emails in search of distraction, but still his gaze is drawn back to those staccato lines. Tim came too close to all those lines being flat today.

He’s pale and—and god, has he always looked that small? Did Dick? Did Jason? Robin’s colours have been traded for pale hospital blue, white bandages and snaking wires in every colour of the rainbow.

But he’s alive. That’s what matters.

Bruce puts his head in his hands and breathes.

* * *

“Thought I’d find you here.”

Diana’s words echo with the click of her boots across the tiled room. Armour polished and buffed, no longer streaked with alien blood.

The control room is empty save for them, spinning thousands of miles above the earth. Outside the bay windows, the Pacific Ocean is a brilliant blue through the swirling white of cirrus clouds. Bruce had come here for the view, for something to look at, something to steal his breath, other than the oxygen tube down Robin’s throat.

Somewhere down there, Jack Drake is waking up and realising his son never came home last night. Or not realising—and that makes Bruce’s stomach clench even more. He remembers Alfred sitting across the kitchen in the low pre-dawn light, cup of tea at his elbow, crossword on the table between them. Bruce, tired and stubborn, nursing cracked ribs and a black eye, melting ice pack abandoned on the table by the bottle of pills he hadn’t taken yet.

“Remember, Master Bruce,” Alfred had said, so soft it had barely rattled the early morning hush before the birds woke the world. “That boy has a father.”

Bruce had grunted. Thought _not a very good one_ but held his tongue, then tasted the bitter words a long moment and spat them out into the world anyway. Alfred had pursed his lips and sipped his tea but hadn’t disagreed.

Bruce wonders whether Jack Drake has ever felt the agony of waiting for his son to wake up in a hospital bed.

Diana puts a hand on his shoulder. “He’s going to be okay, Bruce.”

The gauntlets creak as Bruce clenches his fists. “You don’t know that,” he says, haggard and cracking around the edges.

Diana’s hand shifts up, cupping his face, fingers scraping over the stubble shadowing his jaw. “I believe it.”

Bruce has to tip his head, just slightly, to meet her eyes. Ernest. Honest. Creasing at the edges with her gentle smile.

“Come on,” she says, dropping her hand and tangling their fingers together instead—all the better to tug him alone with. “Beth said it would be a few hours until the anaesthesia wears off, but if Robin is as stubborn as you, he may wake up early. He’ll want his… he’ll want you there when he does.”

* * *

“Coffee,” Clark says, handing Bruce a mug. “Black, like your soul.”

Bruce almost chokes on his first sip, glare meeting Clark’s twinkling eyes. “Stop hanging out with Dick,” he grumbles. There is a tug of lightness in his chest and he flirts with it for a moment before letting it slither through his fingers.

Clark leans against Bruce’s chair, sipping from his own mug. Superman has been replaced by dark jeans and purple flannel, glasses snug in the breast pocket instead of crooked on his nose. It’s some strange middle ground between Clark and Superman, somehow neither and both at once.

Diana has changed too, settling into a chair on the opposite side of the hospital bed in an oversized sweater, legs folded beneath her in comfortable tights. The mug of tea in her hands has a tiara on it. Someone has scribbled out where it says Disney and written Themysciran above Princess in gold sharpie. Probably Hal or Barry, but Bruce wouldn’t rule out Clark.

“No change?” Diana asks.

“No.”

Clark uses Bruce’s shoulder like a coaster to support his mug, casual as can be. The only reason Bruce doesn’t complain is that the heat seeping through his shirt feels good on his tense muscles.

“Don’t either of you have other places to be?” he asks. Their “no”s overlap.

The silence of the room is more comfortable with them there. Bruce lets it wash over him.

Then Diana asks, “Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

“The waiting. Is it always so…”

“Disquieting?” Clark offers.

Bruce opens his mouth then closes it. They don’t push, just wait for his answer and after a moment he quietly admits, “Sometimes it’s worse.”

He remembers being ten, sitting on a hard plastic chair, fingers clenched so tightly around the strap of his backpack that it left welts on his hands. People bustling around, nobody casting a second glance at the boy waiting to hear whether his guardian was okay. Asking someone—proper, polite, just as he’d been raised—and being told to keep sitting, keep waiting, someone would find him when there was news. Sitting, waiting, desperate for news that never came until Alfred limped out himself and let Bruce cry against his waistcoat.

At least Bruce doesn’t have only the worry for company this time.

“He’s a strong kid, B,” Clark says. “He’s going to be fine.”

“He never should have been there.”

“Bruce...”

“Aliens, Clark,” Bruce says, perhaps more fiercely than he intends. “It hasn’t even been a year and he’s—Two-Face and the Mad Hatter are one thing, but he’s not ready to be out there fighting off _aliens_.”

“He was a big help in the fight, Bruce,” Diana says softly. “What happened was no fault of yours or his, it could have happened to any of us.”

Bruce shakes his head. It wouldn’t have happened to them—they’re superhuman.

“I should have made him stay home.”

Back at the Cave with Alfred or—or back at his real home, without the Robin colours to run into danger with. Bruce isn’t sure which one he means.

Clark covers Bruce’s hand with his own. “He’s going to be okay, Bruce,” he repeats.

Neither of them comment when Bruce puts a hand over his eyes. He takes a deep breath. He’s not going to fall apart. He’s not.

But he knows that if he did, Clark and Diana would help him pick up the pieces.

* * *

“Should we get him a balloon?”

“A balloon.” Bruce repeats. It isn’t quite a question.

“You know,” Clark continues, “something shiny that says ‘get well soon’. Or maybe a teddy bear?”

“Hal has a Batman bear in his room,” Diana offers, “we could borrow that.”

Bruce blinks. He opens his mouth to say something about that, then thinks better of it.

“I could pop down to earth and find something,” Clark says, already hovering, looking out through the window like he can spot a corner store selling get well gifts from the exosphere.

“He doesn’t need a balloon,” Bruce says.

“A bear then,” Diana says, nodding decisively.

“He doesn’t—”

But Clark is already gone in a whoosh of air that tosses up a corner of the blanket over Tim.

Bruce sighs.

* * *

They displace Bruce from his vigil to take out the breathing tube. Clark and Diana take the opportunity to try convince Bruce to get some rest. Bruce ignores them and paces the hallway.

“I should call Alfred,” he says, when his hair is spiky and every step sends a bolt of pain from his knee, through his pelvis, right up to the headache knocking on the side of his skull. He’s been awake too long, never at rest even when sitting.

“Good idea,” Clark says. “He’ll tell you to get some rest too.”

“We can sit with Robin,” Diana adds. “We’ll wake you as soon as he comes out of the sedation.”

“No. I… I need—I can’t ask you to...”

“Bruce.” Diana takes him by the arms and halts his pacing. “You’re in pain.”

“I’m not,” Bruce says and it’s a bald faced lie. He quickly amends, “It’s not that bad.”

They don’t believe that either.

“Let us help,” Clark says.

Diana’s hands slide up until it’s almost a loose hug and her thumbs dig into the stiff, aching mass of muscle at the base of Bruce’s neck. “You trust us, don’t you?” she says softly.

Bruce closes his eyes and tries not to groan. “Don’t manipulate me,” he grumbles.

Clark rolls his eyes. “We’re not manipulating you, Bruce. Don’t you think Tim would be happier if he woke up and you weren’t about to collapse yourself?”

Bruce grunts. “Manipulation,” he repeats.

Clark sighs.

“At least let us find you a pillow for that chair,” Diana says.

* * *

There’s a crick in Bruce’s neck when he wakes, but it’s just one more pain to add to the aches all throughout his body. There’s a—not a blanket, a cape, deep red, and it takes him a moment to figure out whether it belongs to Clark or Diana. He’s not sure which one of them ran back to Clark’s room to get it, or when they managed to tuck it over his chest without waking him.

Tim is awake, watching him, a Batman bear the size of his head tucked into the crook of one elbow. Bruce tries not to show how much it hurts for him to straighten up and lean forward. He imagines he can hear the creak and grind of the latticework of metal in his back. Sleeping in the chair was a mistake, but it’s not one he’s going to let himself regret.

“Good morning,” Bruce says.

“Morning,” Tim returns, perfunctory, robotic. Like it’s just a foot in the door to what he really wants to say. Which turns out to be, “We’re in space.”

Bruce doesn’t turn to look at the expanse of black through the window behind him. He’s not sure he actually could twist to do it if he wanted to.

“Yes. The Watchtower,” he tells Tim. “Your injuries were... extensive.”

“Oh.” Tim looks up at the white panelled ceiling, then down toward his toes. “Have you been here the whole time?”

Bruce feels a rush of self-consciousness. Faced with the question, he is unsure his answer is the right one. Perhaps he was not right to sit this bedside vigil, perhaps he should have thrown their identities to the wind and called the boy’s father. Instead of just sitting there, agonising, wondering whether he would have to call Jack Drake and break the news that his son was dead.

(And it was all Bruce’s fault.)

“I didn’t want you to wake up alone in an unfamiliar place,” he says.

“In space.”

“Yes, in space.”

Tim hugs the bear in his arms a little tighter, biting his lip like he’s trying not to smile. Then he’s looking back at Bruce with serious eyes, saying, “I’m okay.”

Bruce squeezes his hand. “I know you are.”

Tim smiles and his fingers curl against the blanket when Bruce, somewhat reluctantly, removes his hand.

Clark’s head appears around the door. “You’re awake!” he exclaims with a grin, like he hasn’t been listening in, wasn’t aware the second Tim’s heart rate indicated he was waking up.

Diana is right behind Clark, slipping into the room and leaning over Bruce’s shoulder to smile at the boy on the bed. Tim looks a little overwhelmed, still caught in the hero worship of Superman and Wonder Woman.

“How are you feeling, Robin?” Diana asks.

“Um, not much,” Tim says. “I mean fine. These drugs must be good, I think I should hurt more.”

Clark looks at Bruce then, like he knows just how much Bruce’s own body is hurting. Bruce ignores him.

“We would have been here when you woke,” Diana says, as much toward Bruce as Tim, “but our teammates are children and we had to settle a dispute before they broke something.”

Clark leans close, stage whispering. “And Bruce snores really loudly. Imagine being in the room with superhearing!”

A grin flashes across Tim’s face before tugging down into frown when he looks back at Bruce. “You didn’t have to sleep in the chair,” he says, looking guilty.

“It’s okay,” Bruce says. “It’s a comfortable chair.”

It would be more convincing if the three people in the room didn’t know how to see through his lies. The wince he isn’t quite able to hide when he shifts doesn’t help either.

“I’m okay, Bruce, really,” Tim says. “You can go get some proper sleep.” He yawns, eyes sliding shut. “I think ‘m just gonna go back to sleep anyway.”

“In a moment,” Bruce says.

Bleary blue eyes blink back open. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

“We’ll hold him to that,” Clark assures Tim.

“Good.”

Diana fixes a corner of the blanket sliding off the bed, making sure Robin is properly tucked in. Once Tim has drifted back to sleep, Bruce lets himself be shepherded out of the room toward a proper bed to sleep in, only looking back once to make sure all is well.

Clark and Diana are sitting either side of the bed. Tim is fine, face squashed against his new Batman bear, resting comfortably.

The knot in Bruce’s chest unravels. He lets himself sleep and when he wakes up—all is still well. Clark, Diana and Tim are all there, just as they were when he left.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are love ❤
> 
> Tumblr is [here.](http://renecdote.tumblr.com)


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